What isReverse Polish Notation?

When you are at school you learn that different arithmetic operators have
different precedence, although that may not be the
exact phrase the teacher uses. You are probably given a mnemonic such as "My
Dear Aunt Sally" (meaning
Multiplication,
Division,
Addition, Subtraction) to tell you the order in which to do sums.
For example, if you are given:

1 + 2 x 3 = ?

you know to multiply 2 by 3 before adding the 1. Early pocket calculators
were not acquainted with Aunt Sally, and would evaluate this expression as 9.

Another school-days mnemonic, BODMAS, tells us to attend to the bracketed
expressions first, followed by the usual algebraic operator precedence. Brackets
(or more properly parentheses) remove any ambiguity about the order of
evaluation of expressions. Many complex expressions would not be possible
without brackets. And brackets are often used in computer programming even when
they are not strictly required, simply to eliminate confusion. For example:

(1+2) x 3 = ?

is guaranteed to evaluate to 9, whatever precedence rules are applied (or if
the programmer has forgotten them). The BODMAS rule is applied recursively;
brackets can contain other complex expressions which themselves contain
brackets, and so on.

Polish Notation was invented in the 1920's by Polish mathematician
Jan Lukasiewicz, who
showed that by writing operators in front of their operands, instead of between
them, brackets were made unnecessary. Although Polish Notation was developed for
use in the fairly esoteric field of symbolic logic, Lukasiewicz noted that it
could also be applied to arithmetic. In the late 1950's the Australian
philosopher and early computer scientist
Charles L. Hamblin
proposed a scheme in which the operators follow the operands (postfix
operators), resulting in the Reverse Polish Notation. This has the
advantage that the operators appear in the order required for computation. RPN
was first used in the instruction language used by English Electric computers of
the early 1960's. Engineers at the Hewlett-Packard company realised that RPN
could be used to simplify the electronics of their calculators at the expense of
a little learning by the user. The first "calculator" to use RPN was the
HP9100A, which was introduced in 1968, although this machine is now regarded by
many as the first desktop computer. Hewlett-Packard continues to develop RPN
calculators, such as the HP32
and some of the latest models have the capability of both RPN and algebraic
logic.

Once mastered, RPN allows complex expressions to be entered with
relative ease and with a minimum of special symbols. In the 1960's that initial
effort would have been regarded as a reasonable trade-off. For most calculator
users of the time, the alternative was the error-prone practice of writing down
intermediate results. Using RPN, it is possible to express an arbitrarily
complex calculation without using brackets at all. In RPN the simple example
"(1+2) x 3" becomes:

3 2 1 + x

Like a sentence in German, all the verbs come at the end. This notation may
look strange at first, and clearly if the numbers were entered as shown you
would get the number three-hundred and twenty-one! To make this work you need an
extra key that tells the calculator when you have finished entering each number.
On most RPN calculators this is called the "Enter" key and fulfills a similar
function to an equals key on a conventional calculator but in reverse. So the
example would actually be input as:

3 enter 2 enter 1 + x

This gives the correct answer, 9. If you wanted to work out "1 + 2x3" you
would input this as:

1 enter 2 enter 3 x + (answer: 7)

You need to think of entering numbers as being like putting plates into one
of those spring loaded plate stacking trolleys you get in canteens. Every time
you enter a number, it is pushed onto the stack. When you eventually start using
arithmetic operators, numbers start "popping" off the stack as needed. You can
also push more numbers onto the stack. At the end of the calculation you will
have "used up" all the numbers and the stack will be empty.

A calculator using conventional logic will internally convert the expression
to the RPN form above. This may be achieved by parsing the bracketed expression
before carrying out the calculation. But it is more likely that the calculator
logic will be pushing numbers down onto the stack every time a pair of brackets
is opened or is implied by the operator precedence. So in effect an RPN
calculator is offloading this work to the user, resulting in simpler logic
design in the calculator. The technical barriers to using conventional bracket
notation in an electronic calculator no longer exist, and yet users of RPN
calculators rarely seem to want to move over to the more conventional algebraic
logic. Although RPN seems strange to the uninitiated, people who overcome the
initial hurdle find it a powerful and elegant tool which is ultimately easier to
use.

Using RPN

You can configure the calculator to use Reverse Polish
Notation (RPN) using the calculator Options menu and choosing
General. The dialog box gives you the option of selecting algebraic
logic (the default), as entered (arithmetic operators are applied in the
order entered regardless of the rules of operator precedence) or RPN.

The layout is very similar to the algebraic logic mode. Instead of the
= button there is a button marked Ent for "Enter". This is
used to enter values onto the Stack. The memory buttons
are now called STO (store) and RCL (recall) and pop up a
dialogue box to select the memory number. There is a button CLx
which clears the value at the top of the stack. Used with the shift
button, this changes to drop which discards a value off the stack and
drops all the other values down one level, the reverse of Ent.

Example:
1.1 Ent 2.2 Ent 3.3 Ent
4.4
would push the values 1.1, 2.2, 3.3 and 4.4 onto the stack
Repeatedly pressing the + button would pop each value off the
stack in turn, adding it to the total, finally resulting in the answer 11.

It is much easier to learn how to use the RPN functions if you can actually
see the stack as operations are performed. To make the stack visible, got to the
Options menu and select Display to bring up the display
configuration dialog. Check the box labelled Stack. This will make the
stack visible for all arithmetic logic modes, including algebraic, but it is
most useful when in RPN logic mode. On a desktop computer you might want to
re-size the calculator to make the display area taller so that more levels of
the stack are visible. On handheld devices it will be necessary to reduce the
height or number of buttons to achieve this.

The current value is often referred to as "X" with the next three levels of
the stack being Y, Z and T. On early calculators only four levels were
available. The stack fills upwards, despite the fact that we tend to refer to
the X value as the "top" of the stack. After the level "T", we do not use labels
further down the stack, but there are actually 15 levels available, which is
more than any real calculation is ever likely to require. In practice you might
leave values on the stack between calculations and gradually fill it up. In this
case the extra values at the bottom of the stack would eventually be lost, but
this is not a problem because it is extremely unlikely that they would be
required in a calculation.

There is a register exchange button, x><y
which switches the top two values in the stack. When used with the
shift button, this changes to last, which can be used to
retrieve the last result. And the stack
roll down button Rv
will rotate the contents of the stack downwards, so each value moves down one
level and the current "X" value is moved from the top to the bottom of the
stack. You can use it in combination with the
shift button to reverse the direction of stack roll ( R^
).